Sunday 26 May 2013 17.18 EDT
First published on Sunday 26 May 2013 17.18 EDT

Reading the Riots – the Guardian's study of four nights of looting and arson which left five dead and 2,000 arrested in London and other UK cities two years ago – was an extensive exercise in data journalism, with 1.3m words of first-person accounts collected. The study found that widespread anger at the way police engage with communities was a significant cause. Gangs were not at the heart of the summer riots, as David Cameron had claimed at the time. Much of the looting was down to simple opportunism.

So, when another European country is hit by a week of rioting, as Sweden has been, it should not come as a surprise that there is not so much a rush to judgment as a stampede. With more than a little schadenfreude, Sweden's reputation for equality, its relaxed immigration policy and generous asylum system have all been placed in the dock. The "Nordic model" of progressive politics, low unemployment and a generous social safety net appears to have been singed in the flames.

Modern Sweden is certainly under pressure, and not just from those who think it is fun to throw rocks at firemen and set cars, schools and police stations ablaze. About £14bn of tax cuts have been introduced since 2006, inevitably squeezing the welfare state. Homelessness has quadrupled. A Save the Children report in 2010 found that 12% of children in Sweden were living in poverty, and children from immigrant families or with a lone parent were the most vulnerable. The OECD said that inequality is growing faster in Sweden than in any other developed nation. Inequality drives segregation, particularly for immigrants. The unemployment rate for Swedish-born people is one-third of that for immigrants. Those born outside Sweden are 15% of the country's population but 35% of its unemployed.

Shaken by the success of the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, who in 2010 got enough votes to enter parliament for the first time, Fredrik Reinfeldt's governing centre-right Moderate party has been banging the immigration drum. In February, migration minister Tobias Billström said that current immigration levels were unsustainable.

Sweden's centre-right coalition leaders should resist the temptation of undoing decades of enlightened social policy. Instead they should ask themselves some humbler, lower-order questions about how the riots in Husby spread to cities around the country. Why did relations between the immigrant population and the police break down to the extent they have? What worked for the asylum seekers of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s that has stopped working now for Somalis and north Africans? These need to be openly debated and honestly answered. Sweden needs to read its own riots with care.